Hollywood creates its own 'Battle in Seattle'

ATHIMA CHANSANCHA, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

By ATHIMA CHANSANCHAI, P-I REPORTER

Published 10:00 pm, Sunday, December 10, 2006

A film crew member, at left, hands out WTO protest signs to extras hired to play protesters wearing sea-turtle suits during filming Sunday of "The Battle of Seattle."
Photo: Paul Joseph Brown/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

A film crew member, at left, hands out WTO protest signs to extras...

Stuart Townsend directs a shot Sunday during filming of "The Battle of Seattle." Townsend also wrote the screenplay for the movie.
Photo: Paul Joseph Brown/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Stuart Townsend directs a shot Sunday during filming of "The Battle...

Dressed in turtle gear, he marched with a couple of hundred people belting out the familiar chant, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, the WTO has got to go!"

But this time, the marchers -- many who actually protested in 1999 -- were extras in a movie, "The Battle in Seattle," about that now-historic week. First-time director Stuart Townsend, an actor perhaps best known for his role in "Queen of the Damned," was on location Sunday overseeing the filmed re-enactment.

The $10 million film is being shot mostly in Seattle's double, Vancouver, B.C., but this weekend's filming in Seattle was the exception.

Scheduled for release next year, the movie boasts some high-caliber talent, namely Townsend's main squeeze, Academy Award-winner Charlize Theron (who was rumored to have bared it all Saturday in the Seattle Center for a scene in which words of protest were painted on her body).

Although documentaries were made about the WTO events, this would be the first feature film to tell the story, using fictional characters to represent protesters, police and other major players in the demonstrations.

In his cardboard turtle suit, McFarland, an extra in the production, rubbed elbows with actors such as Outkast band member Andre Benjamin, who also donned a turtle suit, with a hat shaped like a turtle's head. As marchers filed past, Benjamin yelled out, "Teamsters and Turtles together!"

Under sporadic sheets of rain, the volunteer army of extras headed down Fourth Avenue between Vine and Clay streets, pumping their arms and signs emblazoned with phrases such as "Shut down the WTO" or "Stop Corporate Greed." Meanwhile, an actor with a bullhorn riled them up, yelling about "corporate conquistadors."

Passers-by and residents gawked as the scene was shot over and over and over again.

Some of the marchers, following the script, broke ranks to join the turtles on Cedar. A few of the film's principals shouted lines at them from the corner of Fourth Avenue and Cedar Street in front of Bambino's East Coast Pizzeria, including Benjamin, "Lost" casualty Michelle Rodriguez and Martin Henderson, a casualty in "The Ring," also filmed in Seattle.

"Don't go that way!" Henderson pleaded.

"Stand with us now! We need your solidarity. Leave this march!" said a man with a bullhorn.

"We're fighting for the same things you are!" Rodriguez said.

For some, the fight hasn't gone away. The 1999 protests drew about 50,000 marchers from a rainbow of labor and environmental groups to the city. Although the majority of the protesters were non-violent, a minority grabbed headlines for breaking windows and sowing chaos and discord during the proceedings. Seattle residents responded angrily to the police who used rubber pellets, tear gas and pepper spray to control the masses.

Arrests of more than 500 people after the Nov. 30 demonstrations followed, as the National Guard was called in when then-Mayor Paul Schell declared a state of emergency and imposed a downtown curfew.

Along with about two dozen other extras wearing turtle suits and butterfly wings, McFarland, 51, of Seattle, milled around a parking lot off Vine, one of many stops for the extras, who reported at 7 a.m. to play hurry-up-and-wait until they got their marching orders at 11 a.m.

"Back then, the media focused on the standoff with the police, the anarchists and the windows breaking," McFarland said.

"But there was a huge solidarity from the center, with farmers, Mexicans, a group of Aztecs, environmental and labor rights groups forming an incredible patchwork of people. It was a very good-natured march."

Sea-turtle costumes, such as McFarland's, were used to protest WTO policies, including one interpreted by protesters as disregarding the plight of turtles killed by shrimp nets. He said the costumes used Sunday were from the 1999 protests; they had been returned to organizers in 1999 to be used in other protests.

Michael Shiezer and Craig Olsen, both 18, wore two of the suits that still had faded stickers: "Make the Global Economy Work for Working Families" and "No Blank Check for China."

The two Mercer Island High School graduates, now freshmen at the Claremont McKenna College in California, were 11 when they witnessed the WTO protests with their parents.

"It seems like it escalated really fast," Olsen said.

"We were checking it out and got out of there once things got out of hand," Shiezer said.

Extra Wendy Hall, 44, marched with the main group of placard-waving protesters. As Pierce County co-chairwoman of Jobs With Justice, she heard about the casting call.

A community organizer now and in 1999, Hall said the scene captures just a snippet of the real deal. But the issues still are relevant today, she said.

"It's a reminder that the fight for global justice has not ended," she said. "I hope they'll portray labor and people doing civil disobedience fairly."

It was important enough for her to rouse herself from her Graham house at 5:30 a.m. to make it to filming.

"What happened here in Seattle woke a lot of people up to the injustices going on in the world," she said.